Debate Parties

My friend Sarah recently moved to Kampala with her boyfriend Jon and soon after that she became the organizer of Overseas Voters for Obama – Uganda chapter. When the debates started she started organizing gatherings at their house to watch and she took steps to help us figure out the complicated venture of voting overseas – no matter where our allegiances lie. It turns out that there are two options for us; absentee ballot and federal write-in ballot. We were told that we could do both and they “would not count more than one.” Really, we just assume that this means that our votes won’t be counted at all since the overseas votes are only counted if the quantity would make a difference in the outcome after all the regular votes are counted.

Since the debates were live at about 4am Kampala time, we have a friend, Simon, who has the fastest internet in town apparently, and was able to download clips for viewing at the next available weekend. To no one’s surprise the crowd is nearly 100% liberal, democrat, NGO-working, ex-pat, Obama-supporters. And if this isn’t so, no one has been brave enough to be the voice of opposition. An effort was made for the VP debate to invite some Marines and attempt to diversify the crowd, but none of them could make it.

There is so much preaching to the choir that has gone on at these parties that I feel that I may be getting lulled into the false sense of confidence that I experienced for the past two presidential elections. Next time we’ll try harder to get some McCain supporters but the truth is that they’re relatively hard to find. Conventional wisdom says that most McCain supporters in Uganda and in Africa in general will either be military or missionaries, both of which are pretty big groups here, but not really in Kampala per se.

Ugandans on the other hand, as you can imagine, LOVE Barak Obama. The debate parties have even had several non-Americans turn up who obviously can’t even vote but were sporting Obama t-shirts and wanted to do everything they could to support him. Kenya is a neighboring country and many Africans feel that because of his roots, he will do more to help African than his predecessors. I’m not so sure about this but after some of the current administration’s policies toward Africa and HIV/AIDS specifically, anything would be an improvement*.

We’re planning to have one more debate gathering to watch the most recent debate as well as a post-election day breakfast to watch the results, 8am here is 10pm on the West coast so maps of red states and blue states over scrambled eggs is the plan.


*If you’re curious about this, and you should be, check out PEPFAR – the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief – and the controversy surrounding it. I’ll be posting something more about this soon.

Rosh Hashanah with the Abayudaya

Before I came to Uganda, I heard about a group of Ugandan Jews, the Abayudaya, Luganda for “people of Judah,” the Abayudaya came into being in 1919, when military leader Semei Kakunglulu took the information he received from British missionaries and found that the old testament appealed to him far more than the rest. When he was told that those traditions were of Jews he announced that he, then, would be a Jew. The population has fluctuated over the years and also took a hit during the Idi Amin years when they had to go into hiding or convert (some never converted back), but they are now free to live as Jews in Uganda and have a thriving population of about 1,000 people.

There are a surprising number of Jewish ex-pats in Kampala and Uganda in general. Before I had been here a month, I had already met several, who had all been to visit the Abayudaya. Most of them seemed quite skeptical about the community, but also encouraged me to visit and make my own decisions. Most of the skepticism comes from the fact that the Jewish villages, while they are still poor African villages, compared to the neighboring Muslim and Christian villages, are quite wealthy owing to the aid focused on them by Jewish charities and the attention they receive from Jewish tourists. Even with this, I hear that it wasn’t uncommon to hear the interim Rabbi talk about how poor they were and how much help they needed during a sermon or to see kids run up to the tourists begging for money or small tokens. Then, not long ago I met another Jewish ex-pat, Sarah, who had been here two years and visited the Abayudaya a number of times and really enjoyed herself, not left with a bad taste in her mouth like the others.

Determined to make up my own mind and have my own experience, I traveled with Sarah to Mbale – a 3 hour drive from Kampala – in the shadow of beautiful Mt. Elgon, for a Rosh Hashanah unlike any I had experienced before.

Sarah gave me a little history and who’s who in the community on the way up; the Rabbi – Rabbi Gershom had been away in the US and Israel going to rabbinical school for the past four years. He had gotten back not long ago and this was going to be his first major holiday back in his home community. As we arrived in the village and walked up to the one-room synagogue, there were kids playing in the yard. They ran up to us with stickers of Hebrew letters on their faces and yelled, “Shabat Shalom!” We walked through the open doors at the back of the overflowing sanctuary, and found women on one side, dressed in their best traditional clothes, some with their hair covered, and the men on the other side, all wearing tallit, the Jewish prayer shawl and hand-made, bright-colored kippot, Jewish skull caps. The sight, like the rest of the experience, was familiar yet so different all at once. We were handed prayer books, found two seats on the women’s side of the room and sat down, we brought the total Muzungu attendance of the service to 11. In this particular synagogue, the men and women are separated but there is no mechitzah(divider) between them and there is as much interaction and participation by the women as there is by the men; seemed to be a conservative congregation more than anything else.

Everything from the Torahs to the prayer books to the tallit was second hand, donated from other congregations in the Diaspora. Most of the prayer shawls worn by the men of the congregation had holes but the Torahs (three of them) seemed to be in decent shape.

As the service progressed and I heard my first song, tears welled up in my eyes. The familiar words were put to rich, beautiful African harmonies that filled the small room and overflowed out across the hillside. Time and again, the congregation would amaze me with the songs.

Then came time for the Torah service, the Aliyahs were performed by a mix of Ugandans, Israelis and Americans, men and women. For one particular American, a friend of mine now, being raised Orthodox, it was her first time to be called to the torah in front of a congregation. She shared with us later that it had been a very meaningful experience for her.

The Haftorah portion was read by a young woman who, I was told, had gone to University in Kampala and had returned to the village to be a teacher at the village school. She had translated the reading from Hebrew to Luganda, so most of the congregation would be able to understand. Following the Torah and Haftorah portions of the service, Rabbi Gershom gave a sermon, but unlike other sermons I’ve witnessed, it was interactive. The Rabbi spoke for a bit and then asked a question, I anticipated it to be rhetorical but then he called on someone to answer, and then someone else, as a man stood near the rabbi translating between Luganda and English. People sharing their views on what they thought the Torah and Haftorah portions meant seemed so natural, I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before.

Following the service, everyone greeted their neighbors with, “Shana Tova!” and we were all invited to sit under the large tree in the yard and eat lunch. The apples and honey were replaced with bread and honey – apples are extremely expensive since they need to be imported.

Blowing the shofar (a type of instrument made from the horn of a ram) is something I always thought I would be able to do since I played the trumpet for 7 years and the way of playing is similar. Sarah encouraged me to ask the Rabbi if I could blow the shofar the following day at services. I approached him after the service and he enthusiastically agreed.

Following lunch, some of the muzungus decided to go for a walk in the beautiful hills that surrounded the villages. Once we returned to the synagogue, I found some men practicing blowing the shofar so I joined them. It turns out that they actually came to this village for Rosh Hashanah from quite far; the village that is the furthest from the original. At sometime during my time there, a story was shared with me about these men and the lengths they had to go to for Judaism. As they were going through the steps of becoming Jewish, it became clear that they would need to be circumcised. They approached the main Rabbi and he refused, told them to find a Muslim to do it, something they weren’t comfortable with. After some back and forth, the story goes, they eventually settled on using a man from a particular Ugandan ethnic group to do the job, that regularly perform circumcision on older boys and men.

So here I was, in an absolutely stunning setting, practicing shofar with three African villagers; quite surreal for someone whose identity has always been molded by her Judaism and is increasingly shaped by her time and experiences in Africa. The first day, the shofar had been greeted by all of the children running inside to witness it and cheers that erupted into high-pitched noises from the ladies side – in case I had forgotten I was still in Africa, that sound reminded me. I was definitely looking forward to performing at the second service.

The next day the crowd had thinned a bit, some of the Ugandans who had come from their distant villages the day before had decided to stay home and muzungu crowd was also diminished, but the service and songs were just as beautiful as the day before. Eventually I was called up to do my part in the service along with 4 or 5 other Ugandan men. “Takiyah, Shevarim, Teruah,” called Rabbi Gershom, denoting the type of notes to be played. Then the big one, that everyone loves; “Takiyah Galodah.” Using parts of my competitive nature and lung capacity that I don’t often use anymore, my Takiyah Gadolah outlasted everyone else’s and the synagogue cheered and laughed as I returned to my seat.

Following the service we hiked down to the community mikvah, a small cement pool used for ritual cleansing, to symbolically toss our sins, wrongdoings and broken promises(represented by stones and bread crumbs) away to start the new year fresh. When we got back to the synagogue, we had another lunch under the big tree with Rabbi Gershom and his family. It was very interesting to ask him about his time in the US and in Israel, his youngest daughter was actually born in Jerusalem. I asked them how it was to return to the village after living in Bel Aire(!). Both the rabbi and his wife responded that they missed the conveniences and steak(their favorite food).

I left the village vowing to myself to come back especially if any of my family come to visit. My mom would especially love seeing the Jewish school and children playing and singing the songs that she has been teaching kids in Madison for so many years. I feel so lucky that I was able to visit the Abayudaya and have such a special experience and I know that my next trips there for Shabbat or Pesach will be just as good.

For another perspective, here is a link to an article my friend Glenna wrote for the Jerusalem Post last year: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1192380651705&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Rwanda

A few weeks ago there was a hash run in a small town in Rwanda on Lake Kivu (the 6^th largest lake in Africa). Having not left Uganda since I arrived and wanting to visit Rwanda, I took advantage and joined my fellow Kampala hashers for the trip. Well, actually I took the non-hash bus as to avoid the drinking, rowdiness and the frequent pit-stops that become necessity because of the drinking. I took the regional bus line and it took us through varied terrain, from hills to plains to mountains, all before we reached the border, usually at high speeds. We left Kampala at 9am and reached the border around 3 or 4 pm. Once we were in Rwanda the traffic changed back to driving on the right, something I was slightly uncomfortable with so I guess that means I’ve become used to driving on the left, or maybe it was because even though the driver was driving on the right side of the road, his steering wheel was located on the right side of the bus.

As we made our way down the winding roads through the beautiful African mountain villages I couldn’t keep my mind from the genocide that occurred in Rwanda so recently – the 1994 mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda's minority Tutsis and the moderates of its Hutu majority. Over the course of approximately 100 days, from April 6 through to mid July, at least 500,000 people were killed. Most estimates are of a death toll between 800,000 and 1,000,000. A concise review of the happenings can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide but there have been many books written and films made on the subject; Books – "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families” and “Shake Hands with the Devil” Films – “Shake Hands with the Devil,” ”Sometimes in April,” and “Shooting Dogs”

Please read the wikipedia article before continuing if you are unfamiliar with the events of the time, of particular interest might be the role of the West, the UN and the US – you may remember US officials quibbling about the “definition” of genocide while hundreds of thousands of people were being brutally murdered based on their ethnic group or support of that ethnic group.

During the ride into Rwanda, I would see an older man walking along the road, wonder where he was during that time, what atrocities he must have seen, what might have happened to him, what he may have done to others. And then I saw many children who have been born since the genocide, how are their lives different from other African children? Do their parents and older siblings talk about the genocide much? Rwanda is one of the most densely populated places on the planet so there was never really a lack of people to see out the bus window and wonder about.

Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, is even hillier than Kampala – well, I guess the difference would be large hills in Kampala versus mountains in Kigali. Rwanda was initially a German colony, then a Belgian colony and the French were also very active there and thus, French was the official language of government. But since the genocide, and the role of Europeans in the genocide, Rwanda has become less and less friendly toward the French and the Belgians. In fact, a report was recently published by Rwandan authorities implicating the French as somehow enabling the genocide (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7542418.stm) Because of the touchy Franco-Rwandan relations, many Rwandans prefer to speak English instead of French so in the capital you find older signs in French but newer signs in both French and English and most educated people actually speak both languages well.

We spent one night in Kigali and left, with a lot of hurry-up-and-wait, for the lake the next morning. The drive took three hours and included some more beautiful views. We drove through many small towns that contained large signs referring to the genocide. There were also many statues of gorillas, not only because this part of Rwanda (Parc National des Volcans) is where some of the few remaining groups of mountain gorillas are located, but also because the presence of gorillas indicates peace. During the genocide, the gorillas fled the areas of fighting for places where gunshots weren’t audible. So it was a big deal when they returned to their former homes, they are the messengers of a time of healing for the country.

The town that played host to the hash, Gisenyi, is right on the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the DRC – if you have read “America, the Textbook” you’ll remember the DRC from the section that showed the number of inherent lies the name of the country as the names changed – the country was formerly known as Zaire), a beautiful, mountain town perched over the lake. (Since the hash, it has been in African news because the President of the DRC is accusing Rwandan troops of crossing the border.) From the beach you can see some sort of platform on the horizon. When I inquired, I was told that there are major methane deposits under the lake, and that occasionally that methane bubbles up from the bottom of the lake. With somewhat less certainty, I was told that if someone was caught in the water by one of these lava-heated methane bubbles, they would almost certainly die.

The hash was, not surprisingly, a very hilly one, and started with a nice, steep climb up to a level with a great view over the lake. Taking in the view and running are not two things I can multitask, especially when the running path is as narrow as this one was so I slowed down to a walk and still tripped, nearly hurling myself over the edge of a mountain. Luckily I’m still here to type the tail. We ran through villages and large groves of banana trees. Children ran along with us, something that happens at most hashes, because of the novelty of a large group of people running through their community – probably something they’ll talk about for weeks.

Later on in the weekend I was talking with another hasher, an American woman who had been working there for a couple months. As we gathered at the beach, a mother dog and her puppy were playing near by. In Uganda this would not be an uncommon sight as stray dogs of all kinds are everywhere – in fact, as I’m typing this I can hear two or three barking in my neighborhood at 8:45 on a Sunday evening. The woman commented that she had previously only seen one other dog in Rwanda during he entire stay. When I reacted with surprise she explained that during and after the genocide, dogs (and cats) were found eating the corpses – the bodies of people who were killed, so ever since, dogs and cats were rarely allowed to live.

Because the Kigali hash group is so small, I really only got to meet a few Rwandan hashers (most of them are ex-pats), but those that I did meet were extremely friendly and welcoming as I’ve come to expect anywhere on the continent. I am still curious about which ethnic groups the people I met fall in to, I didn’t feel it appropriate to ask. My stay in Rwanda showed me that they are recovering but having only spent a very short time there, it is still very difficult to understand exactly what is going on. Unlike the genocide in Europe during WWII, very many Rwandans are still living amongst their neighbors who may have turned on them in 1994; just one more unimaginable point in this horrific history.

These are some Crested (crowned) Cranes that I saw in Rwanda - they are the national symbol of Uganda - even on the Ugandan flag, but to this day I haven't seen them here.

Dancing

A new Cuban Restaurant and Bar recently opened in Kampala and already I’ve been there several times, but the opening night was by far the most interesting night. The Ugandan DJs took a while to get warmed up and actually playing Latin music but once they did, many of us converged on the dance floor. Along with my friends whom I had come with there were many people hailing from Spanish-speaking countries, and a host of characters including a sleazy older British man who owns a popular bar in town, a Ugandan break dancer/break dance instructor and a marine.

I had previously met the break dance instructor and he had invited me to his class but we hadn’t actually talked shop – not that I make a living from dancing but we had some things to share. He saw some of my swalsa moves (ok, I just made up that word for the combination of swing and salsa that a person like myself does when she’s actually trying to do salsa but her muscle memory requires swivels) on the dance floor and asked about them. We exchanged some moves and learned that the basic step – top dropping, I think - for break dance actually looks a lot like Charleston. We talked a little more and he asked if I could teach a class here. I thought about it and told him that if he’d teach with me I’d be fine with it. Plans are in the works.

Next, onto the sleaze. He walked up to me and started talking to me, I obliged in the typical conversation of “where do you come from?” “how long have you been here?” and “what do you do?” until in mid-sentence he walked away from me to light the cigarette of a pretty, young girl who happened to be part of the group I arrived with. More in awe of the sheer comedy of the situation than insulted, I shrugged it off.

Next, I met the marine. We started chatting and I have to admit, I went into the conversation kind of closed-minded and thinking I really wouldn’t have much in common with this guy and sure enough as the conversation turned to the war in Iraq and politics and we walked away shortly after, agreeing to disagree may have been too friendly a statement. It wasn’t a surprise; I was Peace Corps, he is Marine Corps, and that seemed to be only the beginning of the differences.

Later on in the evening, he asked me to dance. He’s pretty good at salsa and I love to dance so of course I accepted. All of our differences and the heated discussion we had earlier floated away on the dance floor and we had a great time. Still a klutz even after a few years of dance classes, I managed to stumble over my own feet when the music got a little fast. I was in a free-fall toward the floor in the middle of a crowded bar when my strong and able dance partner saved me from certain embarrassment and injury and caught me. I make sure to save him at least a couple dances now.

Ambassador Becca

A couple weeks ago I noticed a little yellow flag on the couchsurfing.com profile of my friend Allison, meaning that she had been chosen as a couchsurfing ambassador. I also recently met another couchsurfing ambassador who has moved to Kampala so I figured maybe I’d apply. After all, if you’ve talked to me in the past 9 months you’ve probably heard me raving about couchsurfing.com and how it’s really great (and maybe I’ve convinced you to join or partake somehow) so by my estimates, I’ve been acting as a couchsurfing ambassador for a while anyway, without the title.

So now I have the title – I’m an official Couchsurfing.com Nomadic Ambassador! Woohoo! I actually remember how excited I felt to meet the CS ambassador for Tunisia when we were there (there are three kinds of Ambassador – country, city and nomadic). Now it seems a little silly but I was new to couchsurfing and I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and actually I still do. It has such a great philosophy – open your home to someone, show them your town or city, show them your culture, show them hospitality and friendship – not the inherent distrust that so many people *cough*Americans*cough* have for their fellow man – and little by little, the world will become a friendlier, nicer place to be and travel. That plus the idea of paying it forward – you host and show someone a good time and then you go travel and are hosted and have a great time. Really, it’s quite simple.

Who knows, maybe this is just the first step in my career as a diplomat… or in my career as a mooching bum ;) … maybe both. If you haven’t already, you should check out the website – www.couchsurfing.com – my profile can be found under the name Mounass. Just be aware, once you travel using couchsurfing you may never want to stay in a hotel again.

Here are some photos from a get-together we had this weekend:

Trainings

The first two days of training were a couple weeks ago. One was in Masaka and the other was in Kampala and they were pretty different but both went well. There were actually no major problems with either training, just a case of not having electricity at the training venue in Masaka, we needed to do some printing so we improvised and did it at the restaurant we went to for lunch. In Kampala we had to call in backups for lunch as the arrangements fell through, but, like I said, nothing major.

The trainees, 14 in total, were a promising bunch of 11 men and 3 women from various backgrounds from working in community development to having their own businesses. They all converged on Kampala for a continuation of their training last week. This is where things started happening like I had expected them to before. I ended up being short-staffed and had to call in some favors from friends (who I am extremely grateful to), then the night before the training was to start – before we had printed most of the handouts and materials necessary for the training, the printer, that has actually been giving us problems since its purchase, stopped functioning again. This magnified the issue of being short staffed and meant someone was going to have to spend some quality time in a printing/copy shop – the Ugandan Kinko’s.

Aside from the preparations, the training again went pretty well. Many of the trainees surprised me with the number of orders they were able to get – many more than we were able fill immediately. Also the group was able to raise a total of 2,240,000 USh - nearly $1400, pretty impressive since group members' monthly income averages less $125 (even though that is much higher than the average Ugandan’s income).

There were several highlights to the training. On the first day of training in Kampala, the trainees went out onto the street to practice their promotional speeches to people walking by. I expected them to come back somewhat discouraged, like the folks in Masaka did, because the first reaction to the product for many is that it is too expensive (this is usually before they realize all the benefits of the Firefly). However when the whole group returned and we started talking about how it went, I soon found that they had actually pitched it so well that three people were prepared to come back and buy the next day. That exercise convinced any doubting trainees that this would indeed lead to increased income generation for them.

Then there was the bookkeeping section of the training. I didn’t expect it to be easy to teach but after I had explained the simple system we had to offer them and gone through several examples, I was still getting blank stares from more than half of the class. That’s when a couple of the trainees who did understand (they both happened to be business owners) and took turns explaining in Luganda (the Ugandan language used in Kampala and Masaka) to the rest of the group. After about 10 minutes most of the group was caught up and understanding the importance and the method for what they would need to do.

Finally, as is common here, the power at our training venue went out a couple times. It happened to be during a rain storm so it got quite dark in the training room. When the lights went out, without hesitation, each of the trainees reached for their sample Firefly lamp and turned it on so we could continue with the training. It seemed to be a very proud moment for Harry who had joined us for the final day of training.

So Barefoot/BASE Technologies now has our first batch of mobile entrepreneurs circulating communities and selling our principal product – the Firefly Solar Lamp.

Ready or not...

Pretty much ever since I got to Uganda about 2.5 months ago, I have been working on a training to teach people business skills they’ll need to start a micro-franchise selling the solar lamps we’re here to distribute. Well, we’re finally about to start training our first batch of entrepreneurs! This was planned to coincide with the first large-scale shipment of product that we’re expecting to be able to put into our newly built… ok, newly refurbished, warehouse – a shed behind Harry’s house – any day now. After lots of hard work we will soon see our plans in action. Will the training have the desired effect? Will people be as interested in and as capable of buying the product as they’ve shown us? What kinds of unforeseen issues will pop up? Because you know there will be unforeseen issues that pop up, TIA – This is Africa.

We go to the site of our first training, Masaka, in a couple days, then we’ll repeat it in Kampala, then after a week break, we’ll bring the two groups together for 3 more days of training. The purpose of the week off is to allow the trainees to have time to raise some funds that they will be able to invest in their “business in a bag” that’ll contain all the material they need to get started with their franchise. They’ll also use this time to market and raise awareness so they can hit the ground running when they return from the second part of training.

Posts to come on how the trainings go.

Vocabulary

I have a few American friends here but I spend most of my time with Ugandans and British and Australian ex-pats so I am finding that my vocabulary is shifting, if only for clarity’s sake. I’ve found myself saying “chips” instead of “fries” and “crisps” instead of “chips.” Beyond junk food there’s also “car park” = “parking lot,” “flat” = “apartment,” “coffee plunger” or “cafetierre” instead of “French press,” “you fancy…?” instead of “would you like…?” Yeah, it’s getting pretty bad.

I have been conscious of my tendency to adopt the language of the people around me since the New Year of the millennium that I spent in Vancouver. Spending a couple hours every day in the pool with a bunch of Canadian swimmers left me speaking like a Canadian. Lame, I know, but I couldn’t help it. I was ending each sentence with a question-like ascent in tone and my vowels were flattened, thankfully I didn’t pick up the famous Canadian “ey,” and my speech pretty much went back to normal after a few days back in the states.

In Senegal, one of my favorite parts of the language were the exclamations (you can read about that in an earlier blog entry) I picked up and if a French person ever heard my French, complete with West African rolled r’s and j’s converted to s’s, they would likely be confused about my origins or at least the origins of my French. Uganda being a former British colony, they speak English and I’ve been picking up on the way they speak English. My flat mate who grew up in Africa has the African English down to a T and it’s actually quite funny to hear her speak like that. She mostly uses it so people can understand her, like moto drivers. She’s been told numerous times, by these guys, how well she speaks English, so much better than the other muzungus. So I too find myself speaking slower, enunciated some sounds more some sounds less, changing the pronunciation of my vowels.

At one point, after having lived in Wisconsin and Iowa, finding myself in Philly and saying things like “wudder,” I became paranoid that my accent was becoming the worst possible mix of mid-western twang and mid-Atlantic speak. Now I add in what I’ve picked up in Africa, who knows if anyone will understand what I’m saying. J

Up Country

While I am still living in the Northern hemisphere, like I have my entire life, in Kampala I live very close to the equator. To be specific, it’s less than an hour’s drive to the equator. Before arriving here I had only crossed the equator twice and both times (one round trip) were in an airplane. I recently took a trip for work to a city called Masaka, about 2 hours from Kampala and in the Southern hemisphere. At the equator, there is a line painted across the road, some cafes and gift shops and various other markers of zero latitude. If you shell out some cash you can see a demonstration of the water-going-down-the-drain phenomenon; there are three basins set up, one in the north, one in the south and one on the equator itself. The price was too high for me but the water is intended to drain clockwise in the north, counter-clockwise in the south and just go straight down on the equator.

While in Masaka I was able to meet with a couple groups of “Popular Opinion Leaders” who go around to communities, raising awareness, mostly about health products like water treatment, birth control and condoms. Our contacts with a couple Ugandan NGOs here had put us in touch with the groups and being keen to not develop brand new networks for our entrepreneurs, when current networks already exist, we are seeking to identify our entrepreneurs from within these current networks. I identified two future entrepreneurs who were both quite excited and enthusiastic about the opportunity they now have.

This trip also allowed me to spend a little more time outside of Kampala, I’ve really only left the city three times since I arrived in Uganda. The Masaka district is quite hilly and green and dotted with small fields of banana trees. I got to visit a village on top of a hill, about a 30 minute drive from Masaka town (the district capital). In every direction there were beautiful views, and the morning sunlight made for great photographs.

Kids these days

I had seen many adult street preachers before, yelling at the top of their lungs on a crowded Kampala streets during the day. I had been told it was kind of a recent trend, but I had never seen a child doing it. The other night, I was at a bar with a friend when two kids, making an awful lot of noise started walking toward the sidewalk terrace we were on. I asked permission to take video before I started and talked to the kid after while showing him the video. He looked to be about 8 or 9, out after dark on a school night, toting an English bible and yelling until he was hoarse about "Jesus!" and "the Lord!" and "Hallelujah!" - though, of course, like any kid his age, he was having a hard time pronouncing that last one. He was wearing his school uniform so I knew at least he was in school during the day. I asked him if he knew how to read English yet, he said no. I asked him if he knew many stories from the bible, he mentioned one that I couldn't quite understand. In trying to find out if an adult had put him up to it, he seemed adamant that it was his choice to be out, in down town Kampala with his friend at 9:00 at night. I gave him some change to get home with public transportation instead of walking. They stuck around a little while, doing their thing, and then made their way up the street, preaching to other sinners.

On! On!

A friend that I made here through Ultimate Frisbee happens to be, from what I have witnessed, the mascot for the local Hash House Harriers group, he’s been doing it since he was a young kid. That, and the fact that my dad was pretty active in the local Hash group when I was growing up made it only a matter of time before I started hashing. For those of you unfamiliar with the group; the lore tells us that it was started in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia by a group of British ex-pats in 1938 as a way to run off their weekend hangovers. For each weekly run, a different path is marked through different neighborhoods by intermittent symbols and splotches in chalk or powder. Some of the intersections contain false directions so when the front-runners (front-running bastards) discover the path is false, they double back and warn everyone that it’s the wrong way. There are also hooks that require the FRBs to double back until they reach the last runner and then start back on the forward path. There are check points where everyone meets up for a few minutes, maybe sings a vulgar song or two, rests a little and then continues on together. I’m actually still getting the hang of the rules but by the time I get baptized with my “hash handle,” the alias that each person gets after they’ve run several hashes, it should be all good. I should also be in great shape; if I haven’t mentioned it already, Kampala is situated on seven rather large hills, this means that no hash is truly complete without a monster climb or two. Following each run newcomers are introduced and made to chug a beer, whoever invited them is made to chug a beer, “sinners” are made to chug a beer, and many people are sprayed with beer or water for one reason or another. This “drinking club with a running problem” has been active in Kampala for quite a while, the runs that I have done so far are numbers 1258-1260 so by my calculations of weekly Monday hashes with once-a-month Saturday hash, that makes about 21 years of hashing here in Kampala. I’m sure I’ll enjoy my 1.

The NGO Meeting

The other day Harry and I went to the monthly meeting of the directors of many different NGOs with offices in Kampala. We had been invited to the meeting by the director of Care Uganda and at the meeting there were representatives of about 15 other NGOs including Oxfam, Christian Children’s Fund and others. We were given a few minutes for Harry to make a presentation on what we are doing here between their discussions of IDP (Internally Displaced Persons - much like refugees but who haven't left their home country) camps, AIDS orphans and how to deal with unwarranted bad publicity from host-country politicians. Harry gave his short presentation and before he was even finished, people were offering to buy the lamps and panels that we had with us. They were very interested in offering the lamps as part of packages for the communities they are serving, especially the IDPs who are receiving assistance to move back home. The directors purchased the lamps so they could test them with their communities but left saying that if they worked out they would be buying hundreds or even thousands of lamps in the coming months, great news for BASE Technologies!

Making Like Moses

The other weekend, on the advice of another ex-pat, my colleague, Harry, and I went rafting on the Nile for the day. We had been told that there were only a couple months left to experience the Victoria Nile in its current state because of a dam they are currently working on that will flood the area, displacing some communities and effectively covering two of the class-5 rapids on the river including Bujagali Falls. The dam is being built to provide hydro-electricity for Uganda and the surrounding countries, though it’ll likely not be nearly enough to stop the power-shedding or rolling blackouts that are common here.

The source of the Victoria Nile (which eventually joins with the White Nile and the Blue Nile to form the Nile in Egypt that we all learned about) is in a city called Jinja, about a 2-hour drive East from Kampala. We got up early, grabbed the sunscreen and shorts that they told us to bring and made our way to town to meet the bus that would take us to Jinja. After a couple delays thanks to a semi that had tipped over in our path we made it to the rafting company campsite. Before we got our boats, there were a couple people who wanted to take the opportunity to bungee jump (another offering of the rafting company’s). Each jumper gets the choice whether or not to be dipped into the Nile and whether or not to be clothed. A friend has confirmed that if your first jump is naked, your second is free of charge.

We got in the rafts and learned the commands that our boat leader would be shouting throughout the day, practiced flipping the raft and then we were off. One passenger in our boat happened to be a relatively experienced rafter – having rafted on a couple different continents, he informed us that he had heard that the rapids we were to be rafting were the roughest commercial rapids in the world. Our guide, a Brazilian, has been traveling the world, finding work as a rafting guide where he can, South America, North America, Europe and now Africa. His reason for being in Uganda at this point was also to enjoy the Nile before it is forever changed by this dam.

During the day we had four class-5 rapids with some paddling, political talk and a lunch break on and island in between. We paddled past boys swimming and playing, women and girls washing clothes in the river, river otters and some truly stunning views. Earlier in the day one of the kids in our raft had been tossed out by a rapid but besides that we had all remained in the raft until the final set of rapids of the day – Itanda – “The Bad Place”. We set out with the goal of no flipping for the entire day, a feat that’s not too easy. We paddled up to it, our guide told us to “get down!” I started to take shelter in the interior of the raft, between the inflatable benches and before I knew it the opposite side of the raft was coming down on me and I was under water, tumbling as if I was inside a washing machine, doing my best not to let go of my oar so it wouldn’t get lost. Eventually my life-jacket popped me up and I scanned the water for the rest of my raft mates. Everyone was fine, some were a little shaken by the flipping experience but I was simply in awe of the river’s power and glad I had the chance to really experience the Nile.

Fresh

In two words, the produce here is ample and delicious. There are several kinds of banana, sweet potato, mangoes, papayas, watermelon, pumpkin, tomato, ginger and best of all, avocado. The other day we were “up-country” – which I have learned means anywhere outside Kampala, and we stopped at a roadside stand for produce. We bought two large papayas, a watermelon, four mangoes, four big sweet potatoes, a gigantic bunch of huge bananas (about 20 of them), a bagful of tomatoes and three beautiful avocados which all together cost us 7500 Ugandan Shillings or the equivalent of $4.61.

I have had a couple chances to try Ugandan food since I’ve been here. The staples are rice, corn, sweet potato and matoke – like mashed plantains. The matoke is not currently a favorite of mine, it is quite pasty and doesn’t taste like much so you have to drown it in sauce. They have a peanut sauce that is very common here too, and I finally got to try some today at lunch. My verdict is that it’s not quite as nice as Awa Sy’s in Senegal, but it’s still pretty good.

The other nice surprise for me has been the weather. The climate has been more or less perfect since I arrived. I’m not certain about temperatures but it hasn’t been higher than 85 (27C). Who knew living on the equator would be so comfortable?

Month 1 in Uganda

It’s been almost a month and I’ve gotten started at work, moved into an apartment and I’m really settling into life in Kampala. Work is coming along, I’m much more familiar with the project and my role here now which is officially called “Recruitment and Training Manager.” To give you the gist of it, Barefoot Power is here to establish a Ugandan joint venture, which we’ve decided to call Base Technologies. Base will be setting up an training a network of local entrepreneurs who will go around to rural communities to make the Firefly lamps and solar panels available to the people in order to replace the kerosene they are currently using for lighting. After 2-3 months, the lamp will pay for itself in saved kerosene expenditure and it’s obviously cleaner, safer and brighter then the lanterns. Beyond the lamps, Base is aiming to make appropriate technologies to the population at the “bottom of the pyramid” (the poor who make up the vast majority of the population in most countries and world wide). We’ve been meeting with various NGOs and other organizations who may be interested in working with us and through them we have plans to take on a few entrepreneurs to start out and take a test run with the training, the entrepreneurs and the product actually in the field. The feedback we’ve been getting on the product has been overwhelmingly positive, so it’s looking promising and hopefully, from our experience here, we will be able to develop model to use in other countries in the future. I’m now working on developing the training materials and resources, along with other odds and ends.

I’ve moved into an apartment that is shared with two brits, Malcolm and Samantha. Malcolm is a freelance journalist mostly working for Al Jazeera and Samantha has been working on some television programming and films here. The apartment is out of town a little ways, toward Lake Victoria – I can actually see a small sliver of it from my balcony. The neighborhood is quiet and very green. That balcony actually overlooks a swamp of sorts, though from what I can see, it may as well be a nice green field.

Kampala has proven to be an astonishingly livable city in my first weeks here. There are many more western amenities than in Dakar. There is are a couple shopping malls, a movie theater where I was able to see “Sex and the City” a couple weeks ago, alhumdulilah! Several great restaurants; Indian, Japanese, French, Ghanaian and an Irish pub where there is actually pub quiz every other Thursday – yes! We showed up to the quiz after a long day of driving to the southwest corner of Uganda and back, the pub was crowded with ex-pats and Ugandans, but we joined a team and won. We got the prizes of t-shirts, a case of beer and the honor of writing the next quiz – oh and free drinks all night long for the night we host that quiz. Can you guess where I’ll be every other Thursday from now on?

Finally, I have a P.O. Box and phone number now so if you’d like them, or if you have any questions about what I’ve written, just shoot me an email. Becca[dot]Schwartz[at]gmail.com

Here are a few of the many monkeys that hang out at a hotel we visited in Entebbe(and a couple of my co-workers).

Petrol

Before I left the U.S. one of the major things on everyone’s minds was the price of gas. With truckers striking, price hikes every other day and the issue mentioned on the news just about every day; it was evident that people think it is a big problem. It took a voyage of thousands of miles and talking to a few people here to see that gas prices in the U.S. are still just half the price of those here in Uganda (prices are about 2600 shillings per liter which ends up being about $6.40/gallon). U.S. prices are also still cheaper than European prices. It really demonstrated to me how easy it was to get wrapped up in the informational fortress of the U.S. where almost nothing else can get in. It seems to have become a part of the national psyche to be so self-involved and self-focused that nothing outside the U.S. and Iraq even registers anymore unless it’s a natural disaster or other act killing thousands of people. Do Americans really know what’s going on in the world? Or how other people live?

Wedding fundraising

I got to witness an interesting Ugandan phenomenon last night. I was waiting with my hosts for the daily, evening, horrendously-bad traffic jam to dissipate a little so we could actually drive home and we happened to be at the National Theater in Kampala. They mentioned that there was a nice crafts market inside so we wandered around "window" shopping a little. eventually we made our way around the building and there was a group of people having a meeting in one of the rooms. It turns out that Harrison and Audrey knew some of them so we went in. I soon found out that what was going on was a meeting for a couples future wedding. Weddings in Uganda - like those in the U.S. are expensive and almost no one can pay out of pocket for all the expenses, so they hold fund raising meetings with friends and family in order to have enough money to pay - and yes, these same people who give at these meetings are expected to bring a gift on the day of the wedding too.

This meeting was in the form of an auction, the likes of which I have never seen before, but along with the sandwich maker on auction, people were bidding to try to make others in the room do silly things. Sing the national anthem, dance while the other was singing, sit on someone else's lap, get the mazunga(white person) to sit next to the other mazunga(there happened to be a Japanese guy sitting at the back). So none of these things actually happened because others would bid to cancel previous motions. Another motion involving myself involved the "chairman" buying a bag of fried grasshoppers from a vendor passing by, for the mazunga - Becca, and for Becca to eat said grasshoppers, or at least one. I pulled the vegetarian card because I didn't want my first time knowingly eating a prepared insect to be in front of a crowd - hooting and hollering. Later I told my hosts that I'd try it some other time, when the audience was smaller.

First days in Uganda

Arriving at Entebbe Airport I was stiff from 17+ hours of air travel, sleep-deprived and nursing a throat and sinus issue that had conveniently started the night before I left Wisconsin. Even with all this and the fact that it was pitch black out when I landed, I could tell that I was going to like Uganda.

My luggage thankfully made it through despite two plane transfers in two different countries and my hosts, Harrison and Audrey, graciously picked me up and the airport. They welcomed me like old friends and as I stepped out of the airport the warm, humid air seemed familiar, even though I have never been here before.

On the ride home there was some swerving in and out of traffic – something I got used to in Senegal. I was probably slightly more nervous because I was sitting in the seat that I normally think of as the driver’s; fortunately the steering wheel was on Harrison’s side. The driveway leading to Harrison and Audrey’s apartment is possibly the steepest I have ever seen, it was even difficult for me to negotiate on foot, both up and down the following day. That night I gulped down some fresh passion fruit juice thanks to Audrey and got to bed to try to sleep off whatever I had.

In the morning I woke up to a gorgeous view from the balcony. Lush, green hills dotted with red tile roofs and red exposed earth where houses are being built. I could see a couple small banana trees in a neighbor’s yard and down in the valley there were cars on their way to Kampala. Somewhere lower on the hillside there was someone, a shop maybe, that has loud talk radio that can be heard throughout the day.

I took it easy for most of the day, still trying to get better but I did end up walking to the other side of the hill to hit up a bank and go to the supermarket to buy ingredients for a Senegalese meal for my new Ugandan friends. I can already tell that I’m making too many comparisons between Senegal and Uganda, I don’t want to be the kid that moves to a new school but can’t stop talking about her old school. I’ll keep the comparisons to a minimum until I get to know Uganda better, mostly because I’ve learned that first perceptions in a new culture are often wrong.

The first photo is of my host, Harrison on his balcony outside Kampala and the second is of the taxi stop in down town Kampala, on the hill you can see the newly opened mosque, started by Idi Amin, finished by Colonel Kadafi.

Information

During the flight from Amsterdam, we flew over Sudan from North to South, I think we even got relatively close to the troubled Darfur region. When I looked out of the plane window, all I could see was desert with one or two rocky hills, there was no evidence, at that height, of the problems that are still going on there. Sudan is one of the few African countries that is occasionally mentioned in the U.S. news, recently South Africa and Zimbabwe have also made the news thanks to the terrible things happening there. It reminded me of an interview I heard recently with a Nigerian actor/director. He was saying that the west has the perception of Africa as a place of war, famine, disease and poverty. He has a point; Africa is very rarely in the U.S. news unless some disaster (natural or otherwise) has occurred. But then again, Africa is really not the only region with this status, I can’t ever remember hearing the name Myanmar (or Burma for that matter) on the news before the cyclone a few weeks ago. Really, if it’s not happening in the U.S., Iraq, Afghanistan or China (mainly because we’re so afraid they will replace us at the top of the pecking order) it is passed over by the evening news in favor of the latest celebrity or political gossip.

As I’m typing this, I am watching Aljazeera. In the hour that I’ve been watching, they have reported news from North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Seeing coverage like this makes it clear how internally focused we are in the U.S. and how much power the media has in our culture.

Home Sweet (and cold) Home

You know it's been too long when you're thankful that the password you flat out guessed actually worked to sign you into your blog. It's been 6 months, 18 (or so)countries many degrees no matter if you use Fahrenheit or Celsius, many, many great new friends, and several inches of snow, and I'm back in the neighborly mid-west of the U.S. of A. I am now an RPCV - since I have Returned from the Peace Corps. Today I helped cook Mafe, a West African dish, for the umpteenth time since leaving Senegal, though since it wasn't eated from a big bowl with hands or serving spoons, it was served over brown rice and no one said "Bismilah" before we started it only bared a small respmblance to the Mafe I knew in Sara Ndiougary, Kaolack, Senegal. I also got sucked into the television today, something that tends to happen when I'm unemployed and without purpose and in the US. Why is it so easy to sit and watch people that I don't even like or movies I've seen several times for 4, 5, 6 hours at a time?